The disclosure of U.S. Provisional Application No. 62/249,345, filed Nov. 1, 2015, is hereby incorporated herein in its entirety by reference.
There are a variety of machines in the commercial beverage dispensing industry and particularly the coffee and tea industry which produce different types of beverages, and also a variety of means to enhance the flavor of the dispensed beverage by adding either a powdered ingredient or a liquid ingredient.
It is commonplace in the industry to add flavoring to the coffee or tea prior to mixing with hot water, in which case the flavor would infuse the entire batch of beverage produced. Another common means of changing the flavor is by means of small flavor pouches which are added to the beverage after it has been poured into the beverage container. Another common means of flavor addition uses small amounts of concentrated flavored liquid dispensed from containers such as bottles into the beverage container.
Bottles of the concentrated liquid flavoring ingredient come in a variety of sizes and concentration ratios and can be cumbersome to locate, check contents and dispense the correct amount of desired liquid to get the desired flavor for the amount of beverage in the container. As representative examples in the coffee and tea industry, single serving containers typically come in sizes such as 8 ounces, 12, ounces, 16 ounces and the like, and it is often required to use one flavor apparatus with all of the sizes of containers at a particular dispensing location.
To regulate the dispensing the liquid flavoring ingredients from bottles, canisters, and other containers, a variety of powered pumps or pressure systems are employed to cause the liquid flavoring to dispense into a beverage container, including automatically, responsive to a user input such as the pushing of a selector button. A disadvantage is that these types of dispensing means is that often involve complicated and messy methods of changing out the empty bottle or canister containing the spent flavoring and replacing with a replenished bottle or canister, which can be labor intensive.
As an example, some known dispensers use peristaltic pumps, delivery tubes or delivery hoses, all of which need to be cleaned when the container is changed and maintained during periods of non-use to prevent caking of dried out flavoring concentrates, which can be labor intensive.
Furthermore, some delivery systems using canisters require machine maintenance to change out the used canister and rethreading the hose prior to the resumption of use of the replenished canister, which is also time consuming.
It is thus desired to have a manner of changing flavoring containers simpler, quicker, more efficiently, and at less cost.
As another consideration, counter space in beverage preparation areas of restaurants is typically limited and thus it is desirable for flavoring dispensing apparatus to occupy as little space as is practicable, both in the horizontal and vertical dimensions.
Therefore a need exists for a more desirable apparatus and method of storing and dispensing multiple types of flavorings, particularly liquid flavorings, which is dimensionally compact, requires minimal labor to change and maintain, so as to overcome one or more of the disadvantages and shortcomings set forth above.